Accurate title! In the world of Nobody Wants to Die, absolutely nobody wants to die. This hardboiled sci-fi noir invites you into a world where death functionally doesn’t matter — providing you can afford it. As a game, the story is the focus and the mechanics are relatively light. As with all games of this ilk, the question is whether or not the story is worth experiencing.
Nobody Wants to Die calls to mind the fantastic Firewatch, with simple investigative mechanics and a focus on conversations with an unseen handler. These chats serve to both flesh out the player character, Detective James Karra, a man so hardboiled he’s practically a supermarket scotch egg, and his equally snarky assistant Sara Kai. As we’ve come to expect from the genre, everyone is utterly miserable all the time. The poor are beyond impoverished, and the rich continue to swell their bank balances as they move from body to body. Karra is an alcoholic, and Sara has deep, dark secrets.
It is pure pulp detective fiction. The themes are loud, the dialogue is loaded sky high with every cliched line you can think of. The story twists and turns and warps into conspiracies more knotty than The Big Sleep. I absolutely loved every second. It walks that difficult line of pastiche so well, and it is clear the developers know and love the genre. It stacks up with LA Noire and Max Payne in its reverence for pulp, and James even manages a few dad jokes for good measure.
Playing the game? It’s okay. Investigations are linear and heavily directed. You won’t make a wrong turn, and often you don’t really have the option to move much. It’s more along the lines of interactive fiction than capital G Game, and that works for the story it’s trying to tell.
The heavy linearity also allows the small team at Critical Hit Games to massively push the visuals. New York is a familiar place, but Nobody Wants to Die renders it shot through with a ratty retro futurism in vivid detail. Wires upon wires drape from the sky, the rain never lets up, and the neon cuts through the darkness. It’s beautiful, it’s grimy as hell, and it’s constantly jaw dropping. It illustrates that we’re at the point with game engines that small teams can punch so far beyond their weight, which is such an exciting prospect.
What Nobody Wants to Die offers is a tight, 4-5 hour detective story that manages to make a clean exit before overstaying its welcome. The ending, however, is what dragged the game down for me.
Up until the final hour, it does a great job of letting scenes breathe and allowing the story beats to flow in a natural way, but this is just not the case for the ending. It feels as if Nobody Wants to Die suddenly jump cuts towards and ending very rapidly, with the storytelling lacking cohesion and flow. It puts a firm dampener on what would have otherwise been an easy recommendation, but there’s plenty of quality here to justify taking a step into its gumshoes.
Nobody Wants to Die is available now on PC, Xbox and Playstation.
